Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Kiran Bedi cavorting in public spaces was really hard to fathom. How can there be such a turn around, and how could it be even plausible that she should reinvent herself, in this new "say cheese" girl- of -the moment avatar. As keeper of Tihar jail, she brought about some changes which were indeed extremely interesting. Even the SBI started to use her campaign in their advertisements, since rolling pappads was seen to be a useful occupation for men who were chastised by the state or by their householders.
There is nothing small about those reforms, nothing petty. Yet, when she spoke in Ram Lila Maidan, in the company of those who wanted to change the system, she was autocratic in her gestures and voice."Chup Raho! Baith Jao!" she kept shouting into the mike. Perhaps, the petty bourgeoisie bases of the Aap Party, which by its very name is synechdocal in its approach to women, has drawn in over time a roster of professionals and the upper middle class.
The idea that Kejriwal jumped the gun and ran off to Benaras, and wanted an eight room house larger than the houses that bureaucrats have was seen to be really loathsome by the voters. Now, he is back, and says he can govern Delhi. Let's hope "Aap" stays by its verve to stand in terms of its charter, regardless of its losses.
We are hoping for a clean Delhi, certainly, and a cleaner river. The construction boom in the city is now stable, and living in the dust and lacking nothing has been the lot of the middle class after the Commonwealth games. We get caught in traffic jams, we watch films at ridiculous rates in movie halls monopolised by pop corn eating youth, who spend as much as double the daily wage of the working class in the city. We look away as the sacralised poor, weaned away from the communist party into animistic ideologies, who accept their condition, not as the result of their lack of education, but a consequence of their karma, fix us with angry stares.
Number 1 and Number 2 have taken over the city, and the Gujarat model of development, which is ghettoisation, without compunction stares us in the face. Varun Gandhi, scion of the Emergency power centre, Sanjay Gandhi, who converted the city in its present form, by throwing the poor across the river, and with his tirades and invectives against Muslims appears on national tv to comfort or compensate Shashi Tharoor, who has not stopped smiling since he was interrogated for the untimely death of his wife by poisoning. What's it all about?
And ofcourse, Republic Day, which is a day of national celebration, celebrating the Constitution, has become a day of jumbled hopes and victories, as motorcycle feats by men who drive faulty choppers as part of their occupational hazards at work, show us amazing tricks we would not want our children to copy. Islamic State promises to take over the skies, and with the rain, fog, and possibly seismic jolts at under 5 degrees, which are common at this time of the year,Delhi is in for more than perforated eardrums and cracks in the wall plaster, in the winter cold.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Ivan Illyich in his book "Gender" looks at the way gender neutralisation could damage the cause of women's quest for social and political equality. The book demands that women should protect their rights at work in such a way that the biological functions of conceiving, rearing and nurturing are not put in danger. For the last three decades, the State has ensured that the working woman should be protected. And it is this that allows the recent court ruling on the presence of creches in the workplace to be so much in keeping with the humanitarian quest of freedom and human rights for men and women at the work place.
It is singularly embarrassing to read a piece on men and women's aspirations drawing from a four decade study conducted by Vanderbilt Peabody College, USA. The essay is titled "Defining Success Differently", by Kuruvilla Pandikattu, Financial Chronicle Tuesday, January, 2015. To quote him, or the findings of the study "Men valued full-time work, making an impact and earning a high income. Women as a group valued part-time work and cherished community, family involvement, time for close relationships and community service."
So true, so true, we might all say. It also means that equal opportunities in school and being equally talented does not culminate in the same occupational drives or attainments for men and women. The women in the study became "generally employed in general business, elementary and secondary education, and health care or were home makers".

The unspoken matrix of women's education, their ambitions and achievements is made possible only if institutions and their families support them. In the late 1970s, the women activists who supported Adult Education, and Universities associated with them in Manchester, argued that Feminism needed the support of men. Clearly, Socialism and Feminism had a long history of mutual support, and History Workshop Journal (HWJ) chronicles the way in which inspite of this known history, the women still had to withstand the protests and laughter of their men comrades when they wanted a Feminism conference. But the men did turn up and took care of the children while work on this was proceeding.
Here's hoping that multinational stakes in rapid industrialisation does not create the Good Wife fallacy of the 1950s in America. It could be the stuff of a new form of socialisation, more dread than the Haryana rhetoric that women are invisible, women are non-existent in public spaces, the uniform rhetoric that comes up when they are routinely hidden away for one reason or another, or plaster moulded into some societal hegemonic injunction to be what men want women to be.

Friday, January 16, 2015

Yesterday I went to listen to Moushumi Bhowmik and Satyaki Banerjee, who organise a Baul festival in Calcutta, and came to present their work at the School of Arts and Aesthetics in JNU. They were fabulous. Somewhere the syncretistic culture of music has always been profound, and listeners and singers share in a long history of the tapestry of time. The previous evening, Bombay Jaishree Ramnath had calmed the audience with her lullaby to Krishna which was drawn from the folk traditions and adapted to Carnatik music by her team and herself. How amazing to be able to move between these different worlds; to inform and educate at the same time through the intensity of one's emotions and passions.
Moushumi spoke about a woman fakir who travelled between Bangladesh and India, without papers, without identity kit of any kind, travelling in trains and buses, going from site to site, pilgrimage hub to periphery singing her songs, and bringing music from these different places into her repertoire. Against the notion of terror, is the concept of mystical music which crosses boundaries.
When we think of maps, we often imagine them as even and still landscapes, as we see them in textbooks, government maps, newspapers or digital presentations, unfolding for our use as we make our journeys real or surreal across the web of time and space. It's people who make maps what they really are. Music informs us of this ability they have to create bridges, and in the new world, electronic aspects become the key to sharing and innovative. Many years ago, Shankar Baruah established a base in Sattal for creative artists to meet, and electronic and eversions were the repertoire that young people and some elders brought to the site, where they embraced the concept of the momentary passion of hearing, with the long history of technologisation and art.
But the momentary is the base of the formation of memory. Who can forget Kishori Amonkar's grandeur? Or the lustre of M.S Subbulakshmi. The two combine in Bombay Jaishree, whose composure and joy are all her own. Archivalising music however, is on a completely different plane. For Sociologists, the film and the tape recorder are emerging as the most important ways of thinking about the present. For the School of Arts and Aesthetics, it is their very discipline, and subsumed within its everyday palette of methods.
Musicians bring to us the ability to create worlds which are different from the one we know, primarily because they are working with experience, the most intimate of our sensations. What do we feel, how can their ardour, and intensity of feeling make us change the way in which we think about the world? For them theologies and technologies are only ways of reaching that assimilative space, where they are one with the cosmos and with people. My former neighbours Anurpriya Deotale, and Mukesh, used to fill the corridors with their music and it spilled out of their house at all odd hours, violin and sarod, separately or together. They moved on, but the memory of those years when they were experimenting together were significant spaces for their friends. Sometimes, the idea that the work people do is intensely for themselves, and yet, in sharing it, it becomes something else is the most profound space for the performer. In giving, they become one with the audience. Moushumi and her colleagues
while singing, communicate that going to Baghdad or going to Nizamuddin Auliya can be a singular moment for the Baul fakir. And it is in that vedantic moment, that Indians have been consumed, whether it is historically notated or not. For me, Arunachala and Ramanasramam, in Tiruvannamalai become the space of the still heart. The mind is free, and whatever the political conditions people will think for themselves.
In secular India, the freedom to believe has always been a constitutional right, and when the pathologies of self definition raise themselves in violence and corruption, the citizens do evolve ways by which these can be controlled. Democracy is the right to free expression, but when religion, to which music is so inextricably linked by its somatic power, turns depraved, then freedom to practise becomes a question in itself. Leela Samson and Ira Bhaskar, resigning from the Censor Board is a powerful moment which communicates how democracies respond when authority is bypassed, and the whipping up of incendiary emotions is thought to be the right of politicians and cult leaders.
Yesterday night I heard the cult music of the Dera Sacha Sauda chief, Ram Rahim Singh Insan on tv, and thought, this is like the American cults of drugs and death in the early 70s. They were terrifying to read about, for books were written about it, as people, specially young people were murdered or committed suicide in the company of these cult leaders who fed on a particular kind of abysmal devotion of unsuspecting adulation. So that's what makes syncretism by itself interesting to study, since the Human Rights Questions of the right to life and dignity are always at the forefront.

When I joined JNU in 1997 as a teacher, it was because I had spent almost twenty years wanting to return to my alma mater. Ofcourse, the 18 years at Delhi University had been spent very well. I had received a good training in narrative analyses, made friends, got gainful occupation at Hindu College, which shared a wall with Delhi School of Economics, where I was a research student at the Department of Sociology. My three daughter grew up in the environment of academia, friends dropped in, their father was extremely supportive, inspite of work demands of his own. The children were in the company of kids who had academic parents, and every evening their father took them to colleagues' houses while I completed the cooking and other daily chores. Every morning, he dropped them to their bus stops (they all went to different schools) and left their packed lunches with the kind neighbour who ran a creche.

1997 was the fulfillment of the academic dream to teach my own specialisaton. It was strenuous, it was demanding. I was quite startled. My former teachers gave me an Mphil Compulsory (ten a.m class) and a new experiment which was to teach Language students subsidiary Sociology, a 3 pm class. When I said, "But I have just joined!", the Chairperson at that time said "But you are a seasoned teacher! Ofcourse you can handle it!" Keeping a job is harder than getting one, so I went about my duties. It was totally exhausting for someone like me, to time my day by the Contract bus which dropped me to work at 9 am, after meandering all over Delhi, and collected me at 5.30 pm, with a 45 minute traffic jam halt at South Extension market in the evenings.
After two years I started falling down from exhaustion, and in the first instance, broke three bones in one arm, and when the plaster was off, I broke six bones in the other arm. So effectively, I was handicapped for six weeks. After that, I shifted to the campus, and life became easier, but it meant that my husband and I could not live together again, since I became a class room teacher, singleparenting three very young children, and he became a well known seminarist and public intellectual, describing himself as a social science nomad.
The class I taught to the Language students was a eye opener. There were 25 of them. They came from different language belts. They were essentially comfortable in a variety of regional languages, including the dominant Hindi and Urdu, but were specialising in various European languages such as German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, and also Asian and Indian languages such as Arabic, Persian, Tamil, Urdu and Hindi. One or two spoke competent English. How was I to teach them the concepts and terms of Sociology? We devised a very elegant platonic system of dialogue, discussion, and debate through mutual translation. Those who understood explained to the others. For me, that was the essence of JNU, not just self learning, but teaching one another through discussion and loyalty to the quest. As a teacher, when I ask students to do something, I expect them to follow my request, and to explain to me why not, if they do not. The dialogue comes from how they interpret my request, for one gets a variety of responses. For me, the consensus that teaching methodologies vary from teacher to teacher is the most exciting thing about JNU. It would be a great pity if the idea that one syllabus, one window of learning would rule over the idea of learning by enquiry, something that our JNU teachers provided as such a valuable substitute for learning by rote.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Very often the past appears to us through memories of the things we did, and the people we know. One of the earliest classes I attended as a research student in Delhi University in 1979, was to sit in Prof JPS Uberoi's M.A class, where he walked in, looked at the kinship map drawn on the board, and said "So how many of these people are dead?" The space of reading genealogies as markers of time was an important moment. I realised then that when we think of these kinship maps we are really working with how institutionalised memories are handed down, and how useful they are for sociologists working with land, property, houses, or movable property like jewellery and poetry and narrative.
Today, the contexts in which we think about time and memory, thirty five years later, are much more significant, because the debates have changed completely. Feminism and Dalit Sociology have worked into the narrative spaces in such a way, that the questions of land, property, knowledge and personal property such as money, jewellery or recipes have undergone fundamental transformation. The world no longer looks the way it did forty years ago. We struggle with terms and concepts which are quite outdated, primarily because we think that if the village has changed, it has become a new entity, or become extinct. Actually, people carry the mindsets of tradition in themselves. They may look as if they have changed, but in reality, they are what tradition expects of them. This truth is however juggled in the face of the fluidity and flexibility of their own identities. They may conform to tradition, but when required they can leap frog out of it.
When we think of how easily young women absorb and imitate the traditional roles of the past, it is not camaflouge, but the reality of their existential spaces. They enjoy the roles that they now have, as young married women, or as expectant mothers, or as warriors in the work force. They are well able to juggle these roles, because for them tradition and post modernity are conjoined. Because there is a class hierarchy that differs from state to state, women are expected to conform within the role expectations that are placed on them. And with increasing technologisation at the work place, and its concomitant expectations, young women find themselves able to fill these roles, because adaptation is the first sign of resilience and creativity.
The idea of Smart Cities draws in a concept of good governance, creativity and post modern conditions of life, primarily because rapid industrialisation will be seen to give people what they dream for and hope. Yet, it presumes that people want malls, gmt food and synthetic clothes. The drive to be modern is located in the hierarchy or producers and consumers. Rapid industrialisation does not ask people permission. It presumes that people will want to go with it, because it is the right choice made by the Government, elected by the people. Democracy presumes that this arrangement of ambitions and drives politically forged is to give people what they want. For Gandhi, the needs of even one person had to be taken into respectful consideration, so he was certainly not thinking of numbers as majoritiarian or minoritarian.
Village societies are able to replenish the losses that have occurred by thinking of new modalities of resource regeneration. In Pallakad in Kerala farmers are being encouraged to engage in vegetable production so that the dependence on Tamil Nadu will decrease. Farmers are being taught to grow vegetables, even if they do not own land, in makeshift sacks filled with earth. Conversely, migrant labourers in Kannadi village, 16 kms for Pallakad, were found by the police, to be growing narcotic hemp for their own use and sale, around their ramshackle living quarters, and producing illicit ganja from it.
Agriculture and Farming are now thought to be catchwords for extinction. GMT salesmen would like to use climate change as a term by which they assure us that they have the solution for the losses that lie ahead. Alternative Education, like the Greens Movement actually depends on practise and its concomitant successes and risks. When Kerala locates its own ambition to be foresighted in thinking about food for its people it is oriented to policy which has brought it good results in the past. Why should we believe that the rural hinterland is only for purposes of feeding the cities.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

When I think of studying Sociology in Miranda House in the 1970s, my memories are really of the Emergency, and how cowed down we were by it. We did not have a students' Union, and we came to college and lived restrained lives, primarily because we were middle class kids, who were happy to toe the line. Every evening we had to present ourselves to our parents, and they would know if were stoned or keeping bad company or whatever. So life was regulated every day by the stern injunction to live orderly normal lives. Obviously we went through everything with a devil may care attitude, and the day was ours, it was delightful to be 16 years old, and on D.U's green and delicious campus. Food was easily available, at the Coffee House, where even my parents had met in the early 1950s on romantic rendevous, and the MH canteen was known for its hot samosas and sweet tea. St Stephen's College had its need for bit players for their mainly men focussed Shakespearean plays, and I landed a part as Iras, handmaiden to Cleopatra. Shashi Tharoor played Marc Antony, and Meera Nair was Cleopatra and they were both quite noisy as actors, delivering their lines to one another very flamboyantly. The forty soldiers who I hung out with were decent gentlemen, and there was never a moment's anxiety, or clumsiness, so one was never very bored, and Amitava Ghosh, a slave in the play, like me, was good company because he was amusing, erudite and detached. Shashi was a loner, but while he seemed to have no friends among the other actors, he was always linked by some rumour about being associated with some intelligent woman or the other. The term for that kind of behaviour was 'professional romantic' and no one paid any attention to it. He was busy climbing some social and academic ladder, and no one noticed anything untoward about it, other than that he did not quite fit in with the merry atmosphere of backstage conversations.
Rumours however have the terrible intent of creating a persona where there is none. When one looks at the media attention that is paid to politicians, actors, sportspeople, novelists and poets, terrorists, criminals and models, one is startled. Rekha was once asked by a tv interviewer why she was not in the news, and she replied very intelligently."Why should I be, if I am not doing anything?". Media blitzkrieg is the dialectic between the viewer and the subject under the glare of the camera. Yes, people love watching TV, because there is nothing to do, other than get through a complex day at work, and at home. Segmentalised social relationships mean that its legitimate to do things in part, be available for short durations of time, hurry on to something new, and always be on call. As a result, tv is about the only stable object that stays as a continuum of events, which monitors the actions of others who have visible persona, but the computer logs how much time one has the tv on, and on which channel. Since there is surveillance on everything, people get unselfconscious, and permit the State to watch them, because there is a certain triteness after all to human actions and emotions. Sunanda Pushkar dies over and over again, the white objectified parts of her body appear on screen endlessly, and Arnab Goswami and Subramanium Swamy completely endorse the visibility of their views which may or may not be accurate. What are police and judges for, and why do we presume people to be guilty. Composure ofcourse is not the safeguard of the innocent, and terrible things have happened in the history of humans, which remain a secret, but murder will out.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

When we were very young, we thought that grown ups knew everything. And they said "This is the best time of your life!" to us. We thought they had to be joking. There was early morning risings, and a search for notebooks, shoes, heaven knows what else, and fear of missing the school bus. However, as we grew older, we imagined that the world was easier for being comprehensible. One knew why people did what they did, and why they did it.
In the 21st century, things are so much more fleeting. Part of this is because the visual is much more dramatic. It is not just cinema, or advertising, or television or ipods and iphones. Things come and go quicker than we can imagine, values change rapidly, the bandwagon is different every decade. Fashions dictate, and those who are resistant to these changes in ideas or clothes are thought to be essentially outside the pale. Much of what goes as acceptable is now seen to be the driving force behind routine forms of banal disregard of common courtesies.
In an age of instant communication, we see that the real world is constructed, it disappears and reappears, and what we know is what we are told. Truth and reality become increasingly difficult to analyse, because many worlds co-exist, and everything is finite. If the cereberal becomes the code by which these multiple realities are emblazoned, images become the aspect of unifying. If the constant image is that of change, then there is nothing to hold on to. That is why the political icon becomes the key signifier. The actual content of the image is not important, the divisive aspect is not significant, nor is the fluidity of meanings as they are released.
In this world, the young see resistance as a form of enlightenment, just as much as they see their mirror image in the key codes of assimilation. They oscillate between these, without difficulty. For their generation, having a label is the most important thing. This might be religious or secular, it may be based on caste, class, gender, race, or tribe/nation. That label then gives them the sense of self worth. Unfortunately for them, each comes with a prescriptive ideology, and at one level they receive their sense of self worth from belonging, at another level, antagonisms are set up between themselves, among themselves, because the symbols they carry irritate them into bypassing one another or confronting one another. Language can be the greatest of these divisive aspects, since it carries all the emblems of their social standing. Old people look at the young and understand that the evolution of the species depends on the transmission of core values, which include memory as a site of empathising, as well as of distancing. The generation gap is probably the most constant aspect of changing values, and as each generation steps into the shoes of the previous one, it realises with a certain clarity how life goes on, not by imitation but by reason and generosity.